[Mentor David Barnes] Adobe Real-Time CDP Community Mentorship Program 2024

[NimashaJain]

Hello Team,

Welcome to the Adobe Real-Time CDP Community Mentorship Program 2024! This is the featured Community Discussion/Contextual thread for your Adobe Real-Time CDP Community Mentor, David Barnes!

David will be your dedicated mentor, providing valuable support and guidance on your Adobe Real-Time CDP queries as you upskill yourself and prepare for Real-Time CDP certification throughout the program.

Know your Mentor David Barnes (aka @DavidBarnes11 )

David Barnes is the business owner of Adobe Experience Platform RTCDP and Adobe Audience Manager DMP at U.S. Bank. After managing customer analytics at FIs for many years, he spent the last decade identifying MarTech opportunities and educating the marketing, business line, and compliance teams required to support those evolving digital capabilities. Recent focuses include post-cookie digital identity, CPRA privacy management, and delivering audiences at scale in AEP / RTCDP. In-depth AEP tool knowledge. Extensive practical experience regarding Adobe Experience Cloud suite delivery across platforms (AA, Target, AAM, AEP, ACM) plus external integrations (LiveRamp, Salesforce).

Aspirants mapped to David
1) Neelima Vijaya Bhaskari aka @KNeelimaVijaya 
2) Ramesh babu S aka @rameshbabusurisetty 
3) Santosh Sanal aka @santoshsa3 
4) Akanksha Kaushal aka @AkankshaKaushal 
5) Sayyam Dhingra aka @SayyamDh 
6) Farheen Shoeb aka @FarheenShoeb01 
7) Mohammed Shaji Ahmed aka @Mshaji 
Jallipalli Phani Kumar aka @PhaniJallipalli 
9) Gerry Bunker aka @Gerry9 
10) Erin Southerland aka @ErinSo2 
11) Trey Villagomez aka @treyvillagomez 
12) Joshua Thomas aka @JWT2012 

How to participate in the program

• Post your Questions in this thread to connect with your Mentor, David Barnes, and fellow Aspirant peers.
• Stand a chance to win the ‘Most Engaging Aspirant’ recognition from your mentor by participating in a weekly quiz.
• Test your knowledge by replying to the unresolved questions in the Real-Time CDP and AEP community and tag your Mentor to get recognized as an ‘Exceptional Contributor’ by your mentor.
• Stick to the schedule to cover one module/week and clear Adobe Real-Time CDP Certification during the program: July 15 – Aug 30

Suggested Next Steps for Aspirants:

• Update your Community Profile photo with your latest headshot to stand out to your Mentor and Peer Aspirants.
• "Like" this thread to confirm your participation in the program.
• Introduce yourself to David Barnes and your Aspirant peers by Replying to this Thread! Break the ice by introducing yourself (location, org/ company, etc.) and your experience with/ interest in Adobe DX stack. 
• Post your Questions to this thread as you begin learning more about the  Adobe Real-Time CDP Business Practitioner Professional Certification (Exam ID: AD0-E602)
• Stick to schedule and ensure you track your progress in the exam prep guide.
• Test your learning by replying to weekly quiz by your mentor
• Practice the modules by replying to unresolved queries in the AEP community & RTCDP Community and tag your mentor. 

Remember that every post / like / comment you make in your contextual thread and the Real-time CDP Community throughout the program helps increase your chance to be recognized by your Mentor and win exclusive Adobe swag, so bring your best efforts!

We wish you all the best as you embark on this learning experience!

[SayyamDh]

Dear David and Team,

My name is Sayyam Dhingra, and I bring with me 2 years of hands-on experience in Adobe Analytics implementation and reporting. I am currently employed with a consultancy firm based in India.

I am eager to expand my knowledge and skills further, and I am particularly keen on learning from esteemed colleagues like @DavidBarnes11 and the rest of the team. I look forward to contributing to our shared goals and achieving excellence together.

Thanks.

[DavidBarnes11]

Great to meet you, Sayyam.  Do you have any exposure to AEP or RT-CDP?  And do you have a sandbox available for learning and testing?

[SayyamDh]

 Yes, I have extensive experience with Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and have successfully implemented the Web SDK for numerous clients. Additionally, I currently have access to the sandbox environment through my organization.

[DavidBarnes11]

Excellent.  I look forward to hearing more regarding your experience, goals and questions.

[treyvillagomez]

Hello David and team, 

My name is Trey Villagomez, and I have been working with Do it Best, a US-based hardware, lumber, and building materials buying co-op, for about two years. Our team implemented the switch to the Adobe platform for our e-commerce website about a year ago. Along with implementing Adobe Experience Manager, we have been increasing our use of Adobe Experience Platform and AJO. Since the shift to Adobe, my role has changed vastly. I will primarily focus on aspects of AJO and AEP, including audience management, campaign and journey planning, content messaging, email reporting in CJA, and personalization within Adobe Target. 

I look forward to learning more and expanding my skills in this area while learning some of the best use cases and processes for these systems. 

[DavidBarnes11]

Hi Trey,

Great to meet you.  I look forward to hearing more regarding your use cases.  Some quick questions for you:

1. Are you planning to use AJO for any site content personalization or will you primarily use segments to enable Adobe Target or do you have another strategy for helping Target personalize?  I ask because I would like to use some of the AJO content creation capabilities for site personalization, but we manage all of our site content directly through Target and AEM.

2. Do you trigger messages in channels other than your site like Paid Media or email from RT-CDP?

Thanks,

David

[treyvillagomez]

Hi @DavidBarnes11, 

Right now, we rely heavily on AJO to send email campaigns and journeys. This mainly consists of general sale emails, abandoned cart journeys, etc. I believe we will primarily use segments to enable Adobe Target. Because our site is focused on e-commerce, it is managed primarily by AEM and Adobe Commerce (Magento). My history is mainly as an email marketer, not a coder or designer. 

I hope to implement SMS messaging into our AJO platform in the coming months so we can expand to texts and emails. I have also used AJO to create segments for targeting social media ads but have had little success. I have not used it much for content creation, as I work with a team of web designers who manually code our customer-facing emails. 

[DavidBarnes11]

Your usage of AJO sounds similar to how U.S. Bank is using it.   We primarily trigger emails via SalesforceMC though we are writing back data to AEP from AJO to build segments based on where customers are in journeys.  I am curious what challenges you face creating segments from AJO for Social media targeting.

We are discussing how best to target in SMS.  AJO is an option but so is Salesforce Marketing Cloud.  

[treyvillagomez]

@DavidBarnes11 I am curious to know if US Bank's usage with AEM is all out-of-the-box solutions from Adobe or customized for the company. When we implemented AEM as our new platform, we went completely headless, so all of our components and capabilities were custom-built for our website. This presents challenges as it becomes harder to troubleshoot out-of-the-box solutions with Adobe. We work closely with a development partner who has implemented and continues to develop solutions for AEM and AEP. 

It seems our biggest challenge with using AJO to send audiences to Meta for social ad targeting has been reach. Meta tends to display that our audience reach is small, and we do not get any engagement. 

Additionally, are you utilizing AJO for push notifications on a mobile app? We do not currently have an app for our website, but there has been some discussion about developing one. 

Thanks!

Trey

[DavidBarnes11]

Hi Trey,

I will reach out to you separately.  I am not engaged with the AEM team and do not know their implementation.  My focus is on AEP, ODE/AJO, RT-CDP, Analytics and Target with some exposure to Campaign.  I do want to continue this discussion.

Thanks,

David

[Mshaji]

Hi David and Team,

Thanks for adding me to the list. I have been working with AEM for past 11 years, recently worked on Digital content supply chain using AEM, workfront and creative cloud. I am doing my own consulting now, planning to expand and work with like minded partners. I like to upgrade my skills to utilize AEP for complete customer experience.

Thanks

Mohammed Ahmed

[DavidBarnes11]

Great to meet you, Mohammed.  Do you have any exposure to AEP or RT-CDP?  And do you have a sandbox available for learning and testing?

[Mshaji]

I haven't directly worked on AEP, but I have some idea on this. I worked on other products like Target, Campaign, Launch, Audience Manager for some time. Right now I don't have access to sandbox, that is the one thing I see lacking here. I see adobe is improving learning experience with approck.info, they are providing sandbox access to workfront. So far there is no sandbox access to AEM in approck hopefully they will get it some day. Meanwhile I am trying to get access from different resources. Is it required to have access to sandbox for this mentorship program.

[DavidBarnes11]

Yes.  My understanding is that you cannot complete the certification program without access to your own sandbox.  I can confirm.

[MohammedSh6]

@DavidBarnes11 

How does AEP connect with non-adobe products to provide unified customer views? Looking at the tutorials and demos so far, all of them seem to focus on adobe products. Are there any clients who are just using AEP not any other product from Adobe? what are the issues that we see?

[DavidBarnes11]

Hi Mohammed,

I need to confirm what you are asking.  Is your goal to export data from AEP to other internal or vended solutions?  If yes, is your goal reporting / measurement or to augment another database for some other purpose?

U.S. Bank is sending data from AEP to non-Adobe systems though we have had challenges with our internal file management, AEP's naming inflexibility, etc.  Happy to share what I know once I fully understand the context of your question.

Thanks,

David

[Mshaji]

With the knowledge I have and materials I browsed for AEP, it seems that it has full integration in Adobe suite of products or eco system. However in real world, companies don't have full adobe eco system. They might use other products like Mailchimp instead of Campaign, Google analytics instead of Adobe analytics and soon. With these tools how touch points communicate with AEP and how easy is to get the data integrated. 

[DavidBarnes11]

U.S. Bank delivers email through Salesforce.using the WebSDK destination. I would assume that you could use either a batch integration or a streaming / API integration to communicate with MailChimp for email distribution.

Google analytics vs. Adobe analytics is more of a challenge.  For us, Adobe Analytics is fundamental to the integration of site behavior with AEP.  That said, I know that there are large organizations that use Google analytics.  I believe that they pre-process their analytics data in their own cloud ecosystems or datalakes and produce datasets that can be ingested by AEP. 

If you are seeking real-world examples of companies that load Google Analytics data into AEP, I would ask your Adobe account team.  I will also check.

Thanks,

David

[Mshaji]

It could be import or export of external data. Since AEP creates unified profile from multiple touchpoints or products. How effectively it works with non-adobe products. Do we get expected results?

[ErinSo2]

Hi David and team,

My name is Erin Southerland, and I've been helping to onboard and support Adobe CDP at Dish for the last year and a half.  I work on the data side, bringing data into the platform and supporting the business using the data in the tool.  I'm excited to expand my knowledge of AEP and learn from others in the community.

Thanks,

Erin